The Great Profile (1940) in Color — Starring John Barrymore & Mary Beth Hughes

The Great Profile (1940) — Buy This Classic in Color

The Great Profile is a 1940 American comedy directed by Walter Lang and starring the legendary John Barrymore alongside Mary Beth Hughes, Gregory Ratoff, John Payne and Anne Baxter. A backstage farce with a romantic heart, it follows a once-great stage actor whose fondness for drink sends his career and his love life into a comic tailspin just as a young playwright arrives with a career-saving script. Barrymore, himself one of the most celebrated stage actors of his generation, plays the role with wit and self-aware charm. Own this classic movie in color as a DRM-free MP4 digital download for just €15.00.

Plot Summary

The film opens in the world of the New York theatre, where the great actor John Barrymore — playing a celebrated stage star named Evans Garrick — is worshipped by audiences but increasingly unreliable offstage. Garrick’s talent is beyond question, but his drinking has made him a liability to every producer in town, and his long-suffering associates have learned to schedule around his disappearances.

Into this chaos comes a young playwright, played by John Payne, who has written a serious new drama and wants Garrick to star in it. The actor is intrigued, but his interest is complicated by the presence of the playwright’s attractive young companion, played by Mary Beth Hughes, who becomes the object of Garrick’s theatrical flirtation. What begins as professional interest quickly becomes a tangle of romantic rivalry and backstage jealousy.

Garrick’s producer, played by Gregory Ratoff, is a harried impresario trying to keep the production on track while his star veers between brilliance and collapse. Meanwhile, a young actress played by Anne Baxter watches the older generation of theatre people with a mixture of admiration and alarm, seeing both the glamour and the cost of a life lived on the stage.

The comedy escalates as Garrick’s drinking leads him into a series of increasingly absurd situations, including a memorable sequence in which he finds himself entangled with a Chinese laundryman, played by Willie Fung, and a chaotic attempt to evade the people pursuing him. The film mines humour from the gap between Garrick’s self-image as a titan of the theatre and the messy reality of his daily life.

As the production lurches toward its opening night, Garrick must decide whether he can pull himself together for one more great performance. The romantic complications between the playwright, the young woman and the ageing star reach a head, and the question becomes whether Garrick’s talent can survive his appetites — and whether the people around him will still be there when the curtain rises.

The film builds to a climax that resolves the romantic triangle and the fate of the play, but it does so with a twist that reframes everything the audience has watched. What the ending reveals about Garrick’s true nature — and about who has really been in control of the story — is the question the final scenes answer.

Cast & Crew

Director: Walter Lang
Stars: John Barrymore, Mary Beth Hughes, Gregory Ratoff, John Payne, Anne Baxter

Why Buy This Classic in Color?

The colourised restoration of The Great Profile opens up a world that black and white could only suggest: the warm golds and deep reds of a 1940 Broadway playhouse, the sheen of evening gowns and the texture of period suits, the glow of footlights against painted backdrops. Walter Lang’s staging was designed for the stage, and colour makes the theatrical settings feel immediate rather than distant, letting you see the detail in costumes and sets that the original monochrome photography flattened. The restoration is especially kind to the performances: John Barrymore’s expressive face, so central to the comedy, gains a new dimension when you can read the flush of drink and the flicker of vanity in colour. Mary Beth Hughes and Anne Baxter stand out in gowns whose shades were chosen with care, and the backstage scenes take on the bustle and warmth of a working theatre. This is a professionally colourised edition, not a studio colour release, and it serves the film’s comic timing and romantic sparkle beautifully. Buy it now at €15.00 and start watching with an instant DRM-free MP4 download.

Historical Significance

The Great Profile arrived in 1940 at a particular moment in John Barrymore’s career. Once the most admired classical actor of the American stage, Barrymore had by then become as famous for his offscreen excesses as for his performances, and the film leans deliberately on that public image. Casting him as a fading theatrical titan was a piece of self-aware showmanship, and his work here is often cited as one of the last showcases of his comic timing before his health declined. He died in 1942, making this one of the final films of a career that had spanned Shakespeare on stage and stardom in silent and sound pictures.

Walter Lang was a dependable studio craftsman who moved easily between musicals, comedies and dramas across a long career. His direction here keeps the pace brisk and lets the cast play to their strengths, particularly Gregory Ratoff, a character actor and director in his own right, whose flustered producer provides much of the film’s energy. The supporting cast includes Anne Baxter early in her career, before her Academy Award-winning work in the 1940s, and John Payne in the kind of romantic lead role that would define his years at Twentieth Century-Fox.

The film remains a fascinating artefact of Hollywood’s love affair with the theatre and with the idea of the great actor as both hero and cautionary tale. Its portrait of a star who cannot quite separate his art from his appetites still resonates, and the backstage comedy genre it belongs to has never gone out of fashion. Colorization brings this 1940 comedy to new audiences, letting viewers raised on modern film discover Barrymore’s wit and Lang’s brisk direction in a form that feels fresh and immediate.

Technical Details

• Format: MP4 / MKV digital download
• Resolution: HD 720p
• Colorized: Professionally colorized from original black and white
• Audio: English original mono
• Runtime: 82 minutes
• DRM-free: Yes — watch on any device
• Instant download: Available immediately after purchase
• Price: €15.00 (token, rendered by the site)

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Movie-Specific Questions

Q: Was The Great Profile originally released in colour?
A: No. The Great Profile was shot in black and white and released in 1940. This page offers a later professional colorized restoration, not a studio colour release, so the colour you see here is a modern enhancement of the original monochrome photography.

Q: Is the film based on John Barrymore’s own life?
A: It is not a formal biography, but the casting is deliberately self-referential. Barrymore plays a celebrated stage actor whose drinking threatens his career, echoing his own public reputation at the time. The film uses that parallel for comedy rather than drama.

Q: Who plays the young playwright and the romantic lead?
A: John Payne plays the young playwright whose new drama draws the ageing star back to the stage, and Mary Beth Hughes plays the young woman at the centre of the romantic complications. Anne Baxter also appears in an early supporting role.

Digital Download Questions

Q: What format is the download?
A: The film is delivered as MP4 and MKV files that play on virtually any device.
Q: Is there DRM on the file?
A: No. The download is completely DRM-free so you can watch it on any device without restrictions.
Q: How quickly can I watch after purchase?
A: Your download link is available instantly after payment, so you can start watching within minutes.

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